Google is fighting every final boss at once:
OpenAI & Anthropic in models, Nvidia in chips, AWS & Microsoft in cloud, Meta in ads, Tesla in self-driving, Apple in phones and OS.
At $4.6T, it feels weirdly undervalued.
overtime you realize every thing you own is a small tax on your attention.
maintenance, storage, insurance, repairs.. all kind of take up precious bandwidth even if you delegate it or whatever.
in the past ownership used to mean freedom because the world was scarce. if you wanted access, you had to basically possess.
but the modern world has been kinda redesigned around rent where you can rent anything.. incl. people, places, objects, taste, labor, entertainment.. all available on demand with a tap of a button.
why would you own a car when there is uber? why would you have a vacation home when you can stay at anything you desire? why would you allocate capital anywhere other than markets where it actually compounds?
Forward deployed engineers, or equivalent, are about to become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech. And one of the most important functions for AI rollouts.
Deploying agents is far more technical of a task than most people realize, often far more involved than deploying software. Software generally works the same way every time, and generally for the past few decades has been updated versions of an existing technology or concept (which basically means easier for the enterprise to update their workflows on a newer system).
With agents, you’re actually deploying the equivalent of work output within the enterprise. The customer is effectively using you as a professional services provider for a task, which they expect to get solved nearly end-to-end now. This means you need to actually deeply understand the business process as a vendor, and get the customer from the current to the end state seamlessly.
Companies need help figuring out which models will work best for their workflows, they need extensive evals setup often, they need change management support for workflows, they need to get their data setup for the agents, and constant tuning of the agentic system for their process.
Massive role in tech now. And another example of the kind of highly technical work that AI is creating.
We started by investigating why Claude chose to blackmail. We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation.
Our post-training at the time wasn’t making it worse—but it also wasn’t making it better.